ROSAT Status Report #88:
March 14, 1994
Contents
Short Term Timelines
The ROSAT mission short-term timelines now are being made available by
anonymous ftp. These timelines cover one week of observations (usually
Monday - Monday) and are created near the middle of the preceeding week.
The ascii files are under rosat/timelines/ and have names of the form:
stllpt_1406-7765826.rmtg_mtl
where stl stands for short-term timelines (lpt stands for line printer), 14 stands for long-term timeline #14, 06 stands for the sixth short-term timeline of long-term timeline #14, 7765826 is an arbitrary number, and rmtg_mtl stands for ROSAT Mission Timeline Generator - Mission TimeLine.
The short-term timelines contain all pre-programmed commands to the satellite and detectors, and thus have the best available knowledge of what targets are going to be observed, and when, in the following week. At the start of each file is information about the operational and creation dates of the timeline. Following this information is a time-ordered list of timeline activities and flags, denoted by their keywords.
Column headings are DATE and TIME, SEQID for the ROR in effect at that time, STAT for the status of the ROR (usually REL), DUR for the duration of the activity or flag (the activity or flag lasts from the DATE/TIME entry for DUR seconds), KEYWORD for the activity or flag, and PARAMETERS which give information about the activity or flag.
The keywords XOBSER and WOBSER list when the XRT and WFC, respectively, are scheduled to observe. XFILT and WFILT give the XRT and WFC filter settings, POINT lists when the satellite is pointing at a target direction (but not necessarily observing), BELT lists when the satellite is passing through the particle belts or SAA, EARTH lists Earth blockage, NEWORB gives the orbital elements.
Changes to the heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov ftp area
There have been some changes to the ROSAT ftp area in the past few months.
The important changes include:
- The exposure map files which were previously housed
in the rosat/exp_map directory have been deleted; a revised, more extensive
set of exposure maps is now permanently resident under
/caldb/data/rosat/pspc/cpf/.
- There have been recent updates to the RPS5 (new as of 2/22/94) and
"proscon" (2/23/94) executables. The latest version of RPS5 is in the
rosat/nra_info/rps5 directory as usual - pick it up if you were having
difficulties. A new version of proscon is available as
/rosat/software/fortran/proscon/proscon_sun.tar.Z
see ROSAT Status Bulletin #86 for details (bulletins are avail-
able through FTP from the rosat/doc/rosat/ directory).
- The README and .message files are being updated, as well as the contents of the frequently asked questions (faq) files. As a part of this effort, we will be standardizing file names to contain only lowercase letters, except in special circumstances (eg., README files, compressed ".Z" files, etc.) and roman numerals have been replaced with standard numbers, e.g. "ao3PtII.timeline" is now "ao3pt2.timeline". These changes may result in a some mild confusion for a few months, but our hope is that a better organized, more useful ftp area will be the result.
For help or comments, contact:
- Gail Rohrbach
- Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics
- Code 664, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
- Greenbelt, MD 20771
- Ph: 301/286-1516
- E-mail: rohrbach@rosserv.gsfc.nasa.gov
- Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics
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